On July 27, 2025, during the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC), a grand ceremony honoring top global AI youth talents—the 2025 WAIC Yunfan Award Ceremony—was held in Shanghai. Associate Professor Long Xiaoxiao and Assistant Professor Fu Zhaoyou from the School of Intelligence Science and Technology, Nanjing University were awarded the 2025 WAIC Yunfan Award "Rising Stars" prizes.
Long Xiaoxiao graduated with a bachelor's degree from Zhejiang University in 2018 and received his Ph.D. from the University of Hong Kong in 2023. He has long been engaged in research on spatial intelligence technologies, including 3D reconstruction and generation, neural rendering, and world models. In the past five years, he has published over 20 papers as first author and corresponding author in journals and conferences such as T-PAMI, CVPR, and SIGGRAPH, with over 3,000 Google Scholar citations. He led students to win the championship at the ICRA ManiSkill-ViTac 2025.
Fu Zhaoyou's research focuses on multimodal intelligence. He has published over 20 papers with more than 4,000 Google Scholar citations, and his GitHub open-source projects have accumulated over 20,000 Stars. His representative works include the VITA multimodal large model series, the MME multimodal evaluation benchmark series, and the Awesome-MLLM multimodal community. He has received many awards and honors including the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) President's Special Award, IEEE Biometrics Council Best Doctoral Dissertation, Beijing Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation, Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation of the CAS, among others.
The Yunfan Award was established in 2020, dedicated to discovering and encouraging the most promising young technical talents in the field of artificial intelligence. This event was jointly organized by the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Synced, and the Global AI Academic Alliance, with strong support from Orient Nexus, the National Innovation Center par Excellence, Zhenge Fund, China Unicom, and other institutions.
